This invention relates generally to the field of medicine, and more particularly to methods and apparatus for decontaminating virus-infected body fluids prior to their disposal.
Currently, one of the most widely discussed diseases, both in the medical profession and the public at large, is the feared AIDS epidemic and the problem of preventing its spread. While hospitals are taking precautions to prevent cross-infection between patients and particularly between AIDS patients and hospital personnel, for various reasons the precautions are not as effective as they might be. For example, under present State and Federal legislation and/or regulations physicians are not allowed to test a suspected AIDS patient without his or her permission because it is perceived as an invasion of privacy; as a countermeasure the Centers for Disease Control have advised physicians and hospitals to handle all patients as if they have AIDS, that is, impose a form of universal and total quarantine. This is an advisable course because even patients that might be willing to be tested are often brought into the hospital in emergency situations, thus exposing hospital personnel to potential risk of infection.
A serious problem in controlling the spread of the virus is the disposal of the biological waste of an AIDS patient. Just as in the case of nuclear waste disposal, only certain incinerators and dumps are approved for the disposal of biological waste. A site in Nevada has been approved as a national dump for nuclear materials, but to applicant's knowledge there is no national nor regional site for the dumping of biological waste. Currently, most of the biological waste collected in Connecticut medical facilities is transported by a Rhode Island contractor to a dump in Massachusetts; thus, it is necessary to store for some period of time contaminated body fluids such as blood and urine. The more prevalent current practice is to merely collect the waste body fluids and pour them down a drain completely untreated, relying on the belief that there is no cross-linkage in the hospital plumbing, that there is no ground seepage of these waste materials in areas that depend on septic systems for waste disposal and wells for water, or that the the virus will be killed by secondary chlorination in the city sewage system.
However, such reliance is not without serious risk; for example, some Connecticut cities and towns located along Long Island Sound close down their secondary chlorination plants during the winter months to save money and, furthermore, in some of the older cities the piping systems for secondary sewage are very old and their location generally unknown. In spite of this, in order to avoid the cost of shipping contaminated material to a remote location, the practice is to simply pour the contaminated waste material down the drain. Whichever course is followed, at some time hospital personnel have to handle and dump the contaminated body fluids, exposing them to risk, and the contaminated material, whether dumped down the drain or stored in an approved dump, presents a danger to the general population.
While it might appear that collected waste fluids could be decontaminated by simply adding a suitable viricidal to the collected fluid, this approach is unsatisfactory for two reasons: first, because to dump the viricidal into the collection receptacle would require active participation on the part of hospital or other personnel, there would always be a chance of spillage or splashing of the contaminated fluid with attendant risk of infecting such personnel; and secondly, if the fluid is held in the collection receptacle for any significant period of time, particularly if it is blood, it will tend to form large clots which limit the effectiveness of the viricidal in reaching and destroying virus that may be occluded by the clot.
Thus, it is clear that there is an urgent need for a solution to the problem of minimizing the risk of infection to both hospital personnel and the population at large due to the disposal of virus-infected waste body fluids. It is the primary object of the present invention to provide methods and apparatus for introducing a suitable viricidal into the waste body fluid before it has had much chance to clot or coagulate and in such a way that it will continue to act on the fluid after it is collected, so as to substantially reduce its virus population before any one has to handle the collection receptacle incident to disposal of its contents.